Deloitte predicts by the end of 2014 the number of wordlwide homes with double or more pay-TV subscriptions will grow to 50 million homes.
The additional subscriptions generate about £3 billion (€3.6bn) in revenues. Over the coming years, the number of households with multiple subscriptions should continue rising, as more content owners and aggregators, including platform owners such as cable and satellite providers, make their content portfolios available via subscription video-on-demand (SVOD). A further stimulus to the market will be the increasing availability of inexpensive HDMI dongles, which connect TV sets to the Web.
This trend is counter to historical expectations of cord cutting, whereby households would either drop their pay-television subscription altogether, or replace their platform-based subscription with a SVOD package.
Cord cutting has been anticipated for the past decade: in surveys, a significant proportion of pay-TV subscribers have signaled their intent to cease subscribing, yet year after year these intentions have failed to materialise, and the base of pay-TV subscribers has remained constant or even continued to rise in many countries, even in markets with a high pay-TV base such as North America, where over 90% of homes have pay-television.
SVOD seems to be a supplement to platform-based pay-television, not a replacement.
